Happy Saturn's day in late Sextilis

 I don't want to develop a reputation as a moany old grumbler who complains a lot, but I've been awake since 4am. I've long passed safe drinking limits for coffee, and I'm dealing with back pain, mouth pain, slight ear pain and sore legs. The last two of those issues are listed for completeness, but they aren't causing me any measurable bother.

So I finished my playthrough of XCOM 2. I'm now very interested in getting that new Star Wars game that apparently offers the same crunchy turn-based tactics. Off in the distance, there's the promise of a Rainbow Six variant.

    "Looks like turn-based tactical games are back on the menu, boys!!"

I need to make some progress with the terrain test. I had a quick play with Gaea 3. It looks amazing, but the early access version they just released is resolution-limited and doesn't appear to support exporting terrains out. A bit of a non-starter for the moment.

Nauts

Created to support the development of Orbital Elements-based 3D content. These three "nauts" are now part of my drop-in characters' set.

1million+, 100k+, and 10k+ polygone counts.

Fun, fun, fun!

I can see me generating a few more in more varied poses in due course. I think I'd knock out a quick science fiction scene with them. I always wanted some decent spacewalk-ready astronauts.

Rock it! 2

Lots of talk of making some custom rocks. I suddenly remember how good Rock it! 2 was. Does it work with Blender 5.2? Well, as of very recently, yes, it does.

Geo-nodes-based rock creation tool. 

Rock it! 2, Aquatiq, and a basic volume ftw!

Onwards through work town

 I'm back at the day job, which I can do early while we're not in term time. I was intent on completing the next previs section, but I fell down another rabbit hole.

Quick project

I wanted to conduct a quick animation/post-production test, as I have a bunch of tools in this area that I'm unfamiliar with.

I'm happy with the post-work, but the horizon is too abrupt.

Added landscape meshes to fill out the background.

I had some difficulties with getting the scene to move forward, so I decided to restart and use a True Terrain landscape instead of a flat plain. Expensive!!

The overall vibe of the scene is better, but it needs a lot of work.

The cloud colour is a bit distracting, but I like how the rolling fog softens the horizon.

It's fun, but I really need to do better on the rocks and the scatter. I didn't want to use photogrammetry assets, such as Megascans; instead, I wanted to create my own rocks using RockIt V2. The real test will be completing a 360-degree animation that slowly turns around the globe.

Terrain project work

 I recreated a section of the terrain used in the film project. Alas, it wasn't close enough to the reference model, so I'm rebuilding using a more precise one.

 

Nice shape, shame it doesn't match the director's requirements.

Arma3 game area reference

 

Routed mapped directly from the ARMA 3 reference

World Creator sculpt

Floor section

Next, I'll build proxy cliff wall assets, then rocks and trees.

For the cliff assets, I have been experimenting with both Rockify and Rock it V2. 

Rock it! V2

 I bought an addon a few weeks ago called Rock it! It's a nice procedural rock generator, like Rockify.

I went to see the documentation before giving it a test and discovered that a separate v2 has been released. I was annoyed that it was released as a separate add-on, but it looked much expanded and was relatively cheap, so I bought the new version. If I had read the page more thoroughly, I'd have discovered that you can get it for free if you already have version 1. Ho hum!

So here's an overview of Version 2

Rock Type (1-9)

Choose from the following types of rock materials:

Resolution:

Sets the mesh resolution. Higher means bigger meshes, more detail, more resource-hungry.

 

Scale:1 with 86,000 faces

Scale: 3 with 3,357,000 faces

Extra Shapes

Places outcropping rock onto the underlying mesh.

Adjust the scale and density of these outcroppings.

S:3/D:3                                       S:7/D:4                                         S:4/D:7

Small Detail breaks up the surface of the mesh using finer details.

Small details

As you'd expect, Large Detail applies larger structures on the surface of the base mesh.

Large details

Suzanne Res:5 with 0.1/0.2 scale on small and large detail

Odd mesh. 

Early thoughts

This is a great little tool that has a lot of potential. The library of rock types and parametrics gives you nearly unlimited rock variations. Although getting exactly what you want will require some tinkering.

Terrain sculpting

 I'm currently focused on completing previs terrains for the Sparrow Films project. As I'm still working on this, it has sapped my general Blender time. Just a few things, here and there.

16km terrain test

Scatter practice, home-made rocks become mini trees or bushes.

Rock it! v2 test. Nice!

I need to put some notes together for using Rock it V2. It's very good, but the rock formation tends to appear as a regular pattern that doesn't look particularly convincing. It's been a while since I tried Rockify, which is also good and offers a similar workflow.

I'll post some Blender School content after work. Yesterday, I learned a nice workflow for setting up a camera rig, but I didn't quite get it working because I was animating on a path without placing the camera on the path correctly. This was all because I wanted to create a quick walk/fly-through animation of the latest terrain.